From Natural Theology to Theology Proper
There are a few basic ways that our natural knowledge of God can move from a demonstrative conclusion to further advances in our doctrine of God.
I have written elsewhere on the legitimacy of such a method, against those who would suggest natural theology’s “dogmatic use” alone. Such a use comes to mean that we may not “build a system” of supernatural theology on the foundation of natural theology. In other words, often such critics will allow certain demonstrations in apologetics, and they may even welcome “good and necessary consequence” within our doctrine, but wherever pathways are made from nature to Scripture to doctrine (or especially, directly from nature to doctrine), the same people will recoil. Whether intentionally or not, such restrictions prevent our movement from arguments for God’s existence to necessary implications for God’s attributes.
However many paths one might take in such a movement from natural theology to theology proper, I want to explore four and show how each is in fact quite normal in theology. The first of these is the simplest to explain in that the claim being made is familiar. With the other three, it is not that the mental exercises themselves are more difficult. What will strike many as odd is the notion that natural theology is operating as a logical antecedent even here.
Those four ways are as follows:
1. The way of explicit inference: From concluding God’s existence to inferring God’s attributes.
2. The way of necessary relation: Arguments that one or more divine attributes necessitate other divine attributes.
3. The way of theological taxonomy: Propositions that a divine attribute serves as a universal or genus to which other divine attributes relate as “modes” or “manifestations” or “species.”
4. The way of accommodation: Analogous communication of the divine through names, anthropomorphisms, or other creaturely phenomena or signs.
2 through 4 are not unfamiliar to most theologians. The difficulty comes in accepting that natural theology lies under the surface. Please note that I am claiming only that a good case can be made for such. However, I do not want the reader to lose sight that the case for natural theological antecedents in theology proper has already been established by the more straightforward path in 1. Let us consider each of these in that order.
The Way of Explicit Inference
The simplest example of natural theological antecedents in theology proper occurs when an author either explicitly makes an inference from such an argument to an additional divine attribute, or else makes reference to how even pagans know such and such about the divine. Both of these are common enough. In my introduction to God, Reason, and Nature, it was mentioned how, in the early going of the Summa theologiae, Thomas grounded a crucial aspect of divine simplicity in an implication of pure actuality gained from his first way to show God’s existence. He signals this movement in the expression, “Now it has been already proved.”1 In other words, this element of his theology proper was an antecedent formed by his natural theology demonstration.
In his Summa contra gentiles, he similarly wrote, “The first agent therefore, namely, God, has no admixture of potency but is pure act.”2 Heading the next section are the words, “From this it is likewise evident that God is not matter”;3 and further, “From the preceding remarks it is also shown that God is not a body.”4 In contemplating simplicity further, Thomas infers that “being cannot participate in anything that is not of its essence,” so that “nothing can come to God beyond His essence, nor can there be anything in Him in an accidental way.”5
In all such movements, we see explicit inferences from what has already been proven of God’s existence to various attributes that must also be the case.
Those two deductions that Thomas made converge in that, “There must be some composition in every being that is not its essence or quiddity.”6 In other words, to be composite is to possess that which may be added or taken away from a substance. Nothing in its act of being, its essence or form, is absolutely necessary. By contrast, it follows that to be must be essential to a perfectly simple being. He who simply is cannot have His essence separated from His existence for the same basic reason that He must be simple. One might think of these two deductions not as utterly separate, but as two sides to the same coin. This has massive implications for our contemplation of every other attribute of God. As a consequence, no such attribute can be conceived as separable from all that is in God.
Thomas also moves from prime motion (in his first way) to immutability, and then to divine eternity as a conclusion. Most concisely, “Everything that begins to be or ceases to be does so through motion or change. Since, however, we have shown that God is absolutely immutable, He is eternal, lacking all beginning or end.”7 Another way to establish the same he takes directly from Aristotle: “Those beings alone are measured by time that are moved. For time, as is made clear in Physics IV, is ‘the number of motion.’”8 Thomas works in the other direction as well: “if it were true that there was a time when He existed after not existing, then He must have been brought by someone from non-being to being. Not by Himself, since what does not exist cannot act. If by another, then this other prior to God. But we have shown that God is the first cause.”9
Nor are these mere assertions thinly veiled as necessary conclusions.
Edward Feser fields the objection that God can be purely actual with respect to his being yet not in his activity. In the first place, this violates the principle that act follows being.10 Moreover, it “entails that God has parts—a purely actual part, and a part that is a potentiality ... [and this] requires a cause. The reason is that the whole of which the parts are constituents is merely potential until actualized by some principle which combines the parts.”11
Even such polemical elements of a dogmatic inclusion of natural theology provide opportunity for more conclusions. Feser continues on from exposing the incoherence of the objection to an immediate inference to God’s unity, “because there cannot, even in principle, be more than one thing which is pure actuality. The reason is that for there to be more than one thing of a certain kind, there must be a distinction between the thing and the species of which it is a member, or (if the thing in question is a species) between the species and the genus of which it is a member. And there can be no such distinction without there also being a distinction between a thing’s potentialities and its actualities.”12
“And the inference runs in the other direction as well. That is to say, what is absolutely simple or noncomposite, though it is actual—if it had no actuality, it would not exist—cannot also be potential in any way, for then it would have an actual part and a part that is a potentiality, and thus not be simple or noncomposite. So, something is purely actual if and only if it is absolutely simple.”13
Some may be inclined to reject such a method within theology proper on the grounds that these attributes being discussed are not biblically specified attributes. The assumption behind this rejection is that supernatural theology must arise from special revelation alone. However, the data of special revelation is entirely constructed ectypally—that is, through the media of created things (i.e. nature). Others may be content to dismiss this method as reducible to Thomism. The criticism may also add that such further demonstrations are still very minimalist, so that these inferred attributes are not “the God of Scripture.”
A line of reasoning used by Richard Baxter may be a better introduction to some. It should be noted that, in his work The Reasons of the Christian Religion, Baxter begins not only with things in the world, a posteriori, as does Aquinas, but he makes a defense of the reasonableness of trusting the senses.14
As concisely as I can summarize, Baxter’s argument for God’s existence on the basis of power, intellect, and will, moves in two steps. First, these are more excellent in any creature than in their opposites (power over impotence, understanding over ignorance, free choice over involuntary motion); second, since the cause of anything must be more excellent than its effect, that is, in possessing the resources to produce the effect (whether formally or eminently), it follows that there must be a First Cause which is in the totality of its being, all-power, all-knowledge, and all-freedom.15
From that original conclusion to Baxter’s natural theological argument, he further infers the necessity of no less than eighteen divine attributes: 1. absolute perfection (in all other attributes), 2. aseity (or self-sufficiency), 3. spirituality, 4. simplicity, 5. impassibility, 6. immutability, 7. immortality, 8. immensity (or omnipresence), 9. incomprehensibility, 10. infinity, 11. oneness; and from circling back to the original conclusion of power, intelligence, and will, he infers 12. omnipotence, 13. omniscience, then finally, 14. wisdom, 15. love, 16. goodness, 17. holiness, and 18. happiness (or blessedness).16
Plainly, Baxter would not have agreed with the assessment that one cannot or should not form demonstrations that begin, a posteriori, from created things to God’s existence, and then, from that conception in the conclusion, to a fuller body of knowledge in one’s doctrine of God.
While for Stephen Charnock, the subject of “practical atheism” was the motivating factor of his natural theological reflection, the fact is that such reasoning still featured throughout his sections on the attributes of God. When he proceeded in this way, the tendency was to root such knowledge in a discursive exercise of which the unbeliever had some knowledge: “Men who will not listen to Scripture, as having no counterpart of it in their souls, cannot easily deny natural reason, which rises up on all sides for the justification of this truth.”17 Although Charnock adds a qualification for the sense in which Scripture assumes God’s existence, rather than reasoning to it, he nevertheless shows the same premodern tendency to resist insulating those Scriptural claims from natural knowledge:
“Whatever arguments the Scripture uses to prove it are drawn from nature (though indeed it does not so much prove as suppose the existence of a God), but what arguments it uses are from the creatures, and particularly the heavens, which are the public preachers of this doctrine.”18
For Petrus van Mastricht there is a “testimony of nature” that God must be one, which he unpacks in six points: 1. that in the subordination of things, we must stop at one thing; 2. which must be infinite; 3. and most perfect; 4. omnipotent; 5. and that, in forming one world; 6. he cannot tolerate a superior or even equal.19 In consideration of reasons from natural theological antecedents, such as infinity, independence, most simple act, immutability, omnipotence, and perfection, Mastricht concludes the necessity of divine immensity and omnipresence. It must be repeated here that such data “of nature” is referring to the objective nature of things—that is, the way that reality is, independent of finite minds; and that implies the independence of such data from the noetic effects of those minds.
Mastricht then leaves no doubt that this is not restricted to propositions made by Christians within dogmatics alone: “Persuaded by these reasons, even the pagans believed ‘all things’ to be ‘full of Jove.’”20 The point is not that pagans may naturally draw these further right conclusions. It is rather that, from the same path of natural knowledge that pagans reason wrongly by, we ought to rightly conclude such attributes of the true God.
The Way of Necessary Relation
It may be that this is the most difficult path to show, namely, the case of arguments that one or more divine attributes necessitate other divine attributes. This is a reliance on logic within one’s theology proper. Some may argue that this does not necessarily imply natural theology, while others may go further and insist that it must not invoke natural theology. It may help to clarify that I am not suggesting that all such exercises—or even most such exercises—of arguing for such logical coherence necessitates antecedents from natural theology, much less consciously held or explicitly stated antecedents. It is only to say that such an exercise may be grounded in the natural knowledge of God in various ways.
Consider a few examples.
Charnock moves from divine eternity to a simple omniscience in the following way.
“If eternity be one indivisible point and is not diffused into preceding and succeeding parts, then that which is known in it or by it is perceived without succession, for knowledge is as the substance of the person knowing; if that has various actions and distinct from itself, then it understands things in differences of time as time present them to view. But since God’s being depends not upon the revolutions of time, so neither does his knowledge; it exceeds all motions of years and days, comprehends infinite spaces of past and future.”21
The conception of omniscience articulated here may be argued from a host of biblical passages, while the majority of passages used to argue for eternity must make inferences to arrive at something like this “indivisible point.”22 Still less explicit in the Bible is the principle in Charnock’s statement that “knowledge is as the substance of the person knowing.”
Here “knowledge is” has as its referent knowledge in general—that is, the nature of knowledge per se, which must include and take as its point of entry, the knowledge of created minds. That is a species of natural theology. The way God’s knowledge must be is concluded from the way knowledge per se must be.
However one may attempt to establish this by Scripture, we may recall Feser’s summary of Thomas’s use of the principles that action follows being (agere sequitur esse).23
This is a principal with broad application to metaphysics and the natural sciences alike. In short, it is a natural principle. That it is a natural principle does not mean that it cannot also be a scriptural principle, but simply that a truth about God is communicated in the broader nature of things. When applied to God, it is a principle of natural theology.
If Charnock meant to base the principle on Scripture rather than nature, it is not clear how he did so, as no passage is referenced. He argues in the same manner in moving from spirituality to omnipotence: “Every substance, the more spiritual it is, the more powerful it is.”24 This may be counterintuitive to those living in a materialist age, but even many Christians would be hard pressed to reason this out from Scripture. One might say that since God is depicted as most powerful in the Bible, and since God is spirit (Jn. 4:24), it follows that spirit is more powerful than all.
It is true that such an argument has sound premises and a sound conclusion, but it can be charged with an equivocal predicate term, “spirit.” After all, there are other spiritual beings, and it has not been made clear, from those premises alone, why such beings are necessarily most powerful. More extra-biblical reasoning is required, even if in conjunction with other biblical texts.
While Charnock happens to ground this in other attributes of God—the unity of his essence25—it may also be shown, a posteriori, from creatures. For example, a body awake and a body asleep are both bodies, yet somebody who is awake (animated by his spiritual nature) will get much more done. A person habituated to various disciplines will receive more rewards and attain more peaceful leisure than the person who has been mastered by his merely animal nature. Examples could be multiplied to show that the more spiritual a man is—that is, the more he acts more like a man and less like a beast, or some object more inanimate—the more power he has exerted in the world.
I will only conclude this point by adding that Charnock argues in a similar way in his inferences from perfection to omniscience and from immutability to omnipresence;26 and Turretin argues similarity in inferences from four different attributes to simplicity, and from the impossibility of multiple infinite, eternal, omnipotence, etc. beings to unity.27 He uses the language, “Reason also confirms the same thing. It is a contradiction to suppose more infinite, eternal, omnipotent and most perfect beings (such as God should be) and also more rulers of the world.”28
The Way of Theological Taxonomy
The second difficult case involves divine attributes proposed to serve as a universal or genus to which other divine attributes relate as “modes” or “manifestations” or “species”.
Mastricht furnishes us with a clear example in relating infinity to quantity. In fact, this is part of a broader taxonomy of attributes for Mastricht. While unity is considered a species as discrete quantity, infinity is a species as continuous quantity. Yet infinity is also a genus of relation, “partly to where he is,” called either immensity, omnipresence, or ubiquity; “partly to when he is,” called eternity.29 Note the “where” and the “when” as two species of relation between infinity and creation.
Herman Bavinck reasons similarly about divine infinity.
“When applied to time, God’s infinity is called eternity; when applied to space, it is called omnipresence … Infinity is not a negative but a positive concept: it means, not that God has no distinct being of his own, but that he is not limited by anything finite and creaturely.”30
Some may be inclined to think of these as merely useful categorizations. However, in our idea of relation to place and relation to time, these clearly have broader logical extension than to how God specifically relates to place and time. Many other things exhibit lesser degrees of ubiquity and permanence, for example, so that our more rudimentary ideas of things comprehending—whether through space or time—other things are developed in our minds prior to, and contributing to, our first conceptions of God.
The Way of Accommodation
The final difficult case involves analogous communication that comes through created natures. Theological analogy is not taught in the explicit biblical text. In showing the importance of natural theology in rightly interpreting Scripture, David Haines speaks of the “principle of appropriate predication.”
“This principle,” he says, “is what helps the interpreter of Scriptures know when some attribute is ‘properly’ predicated of God’s nature (e.g., immutability, Num. 23:19), and when some attribute is predicated as an anthropopathism, an anthropomorphism, or a form of improper analogy (e.g., repentance, Jer. 26:13 KJV). In other words, natural theology is a precondition for proper biblical interpretation.”31
There are no passages of Scripture that explicitly teach us principles for distinguishing between the properly divine (ad intra) and the more manifestly analogical (ad extra). However we choose to express that difference will use creaturely media, even if also citing biblical texts verbatim. Haines goes on to summarize a few types of natural knowledge that function as preconditions to even the most basic kind of interpretations of Scripture: “acquired linguistic knowledge, experience and knowledge of the sensible world, philosophical or theoretical knowledge, natural knowledge of the divine nature, and the very hermeneutical principles that we so meticulously apply to Scripture in order to arrive at ‘biblical’ teaching.”32
This is not only the case about anthropomorphisms or other physical phenomena in narrative texts, but also about figurative language in poetic texts and the divine names.
In William Alston’s Divine Nature and Human Language, he takes on the twentieth century theological axiom that speech about God proposing to be both literal and true was impossible. Thus an “irreducible metaphor” is one in which no term can hold as literal. However, Alston concludes, “if no term can be literally applied to God, we cannot do anything to spell out in literal terms what is said metaphorically about God.”33 Alston also hints at the crucial place of realism underlying this principle. While posing literal truth claim as a proposition, the metaphor implies “that it is sufficiently like the exemplar to make the latter a useful model of the former.”34 But the speaker means it in an objective sense.
“Thus in the typical metaphorical statement the speaker is ‘building on’ the relevant meaning of his predicate term in two ways. First, he is presenting the sort of thing to which the term literally applies as a model of the subject. Second, he has in mind one or more resemblances between model and subject, and he extracts from these resemblances what he means to be attributing to the subject.”35
So we understand two extreme errors in saying of God, that “under his wings you will find refuge” (Ps. 91:4). That is, we understand both that God does not literally have wings, and that the Psalmist is still claiming something true about God. The wings are clearly related to the manner of the refuge He provides, and our knowledge of this is possessed by discursive reason concerning the nature of created things.
For Thomas it is necessarily the case that “we know God from creatures as their principle, and also by way of excellence and remotion. In this way therefore He can be named by us from creatures, yet not so that the name which signifies Him expresses the divine essence in itself … Because we know and name God from creatures, the names we attribute to God signify what belongs to material creatures, of which the knowledge is natural to us.”36
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1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia.3.1.r1.
2. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, Book One: God (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1975), I.16.5 [101].
3. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, I.17.1 [101].
4. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, I.20.1 [106].
5. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, I.23.2, 1 [121].
6. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, I.21.2 [116].
7. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, I.15.2 [98].
8. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, I.15.3 [98].
9. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, I.15.4 [98].
10. According to Edward Feser: “The basic idea is that what a thing does necessarily reflects what it is. Eyes and ears function differently because they are structured differently.” Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), 174.
11. Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, 185.
12. Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, 186.
13. Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, 187.
14. Richard Baxter, Baxter’s Practical Works, Volume 2: An Alarm to the Unconverted (Ligonier, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1990), 6-11.
15. Baxter, Practical Works, II:12.
16. Baxter, Practical Works, II:12-15.
17. Stephen Charnock, Discourses on the Existence and Attributes of God, Volume 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), 46.
18. Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, I:67.
19. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, Volume 2: Faith in the Triune God (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2020), 169.
20. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, II:186.
21. Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, I:438.
22. cf. Paul Helm, Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) for a scholarly defense of such a view of divine eternity.
23. cf. Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, 174-76.
24. Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, II:937.
25. Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, II:913.
26. Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, I:572, 573, 935.
27. Turretin, Institutes, I.3.7.4.
28. Turretin, Institutes, I.3.3.6.
29. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, II:181; cf. 193.
30. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, II:159, 160.
31. David Haines, Natural Theology: A Biblical and Historical Introduction and Defense (Landrum, SC: Davenant Press, 2021), 21.
32. Haines, Natural Theology, 23.
33. William P. Alston, Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 18.
34. Alston, Divine Nature and Human Language, 22.
35. Alston, Divine Nature and Human Language, 23.
36. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia.13.1.
